Gareth Davies' Personal Blog

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We recently released a really powerful, highly visual, fully mobile responsive theme. The first use for this was for our own Home Learning interface that combines the workflow and homework monitoring of the Frog Learn product with the revision and academic reporting of the Frog Play product into one seamless, mobile friendly interface.

In case you’re not aware, the latest version of Frog marks a significant shift in the platform. You are now able to build fully functional platforms / products inside Frog Sites now. This will be familiar to schools that used the previous Frog 3 platform, and is generating a lot of excitement. Of course, with Frog Code, this means that Frog Learn is way more powerful than Frog 3 ever was.

Greenshaw High School has already had this theme adapted to provide their own similar interfaces within their world of Frog.

New reports and contextual data in Progress, loads of improvements to assignments, including integration with the student calendar, awesome (genuinely awesome) Google integration, and a whole set of learning content (videos) now in Frog Play, along with loads of other bits and pieces.

Simon Nicholas from Ralph Allen School has designed one of his Frog dashboards to look like the computers on Star Trek The Next Generation (apparently it’s called LCARS). Simon has submitted this site to the FrogStore for those that want to grab it (just hit the FrogStore app inside Frog). Thank you for sharing, Simon!

Our guys liked it an entirely unhealthy way in my opinion. I’m told they’re now working on a theme to replicate the look.

Click the image below to see a video of how the animations work.

For those interested in how he built this, it’s constructed entirely in a single site using a basic fullscreen theme and used Photoshop to create the buttons. The animations are .gifs in media widgets and the menu icons are pictures placed in a text widget. Simples… But very cool.

Our latest theme has been tweaked to make it mobile responsive, which means it changes what it looks like depending on what device it’s on.

We’ve been able to do this on any theme for a number of years now, but for some reason not done it on the one’s that come pre-installed with Frog.

“Why not, are you stupid?” you may ask.

“Yes. It appears so.”

I wish I had a better answer…

Here’s an example on a normal browser:

And here’s what it looks like on an iPhone. Note the little “burger” menu in the top right hand corner.

Remember that you can build your own themes, what Frog looks like is completely up to you. I believe there’s a bit of code that you can paste into any theme to make it do this. To see more take a look at our Community Site – Mobile Themes.

Keith Pearey from the British School of Paris couldn’t make our Eat-Share-Learn at Bett, but he prepared this video for us, showing how his school makes the most of iPads. Check out the amazing stuff they’re making happen with FrogLearn.

Frog Code is born, making Frog Learn by far the most powerful learning platform available anywhere. If you’re the kind of person that likes to push the boundaries then ask someone on our stand to show you the Frog Code Integrated Development Environment. I’m saying no more – it’s a genuine game changer…

Frog Progress is changing the way assessment is done, teaching is done and learning is done. And we’re now starting to see comments in Ofsted reports that agree with us. We are still at the beginning of this journey but the opportunity not just on the front lines of it.

As you know Frog have won Company of the Year twice in the past three years, and this year we’re up for another 3 BETT awards. To be honest, I’m not expecting us to win Company of the Year again, they can’t keep giving it to the same company, can they? But hopefully we’ll walk away with another trophy for our cabinet.

If you’re already part of the Frog family then please come along to La Barrique Wine Bar and Café near the west entrance to ExCel. We’ll be there from 11am until 4pm and there will be a free lunch for all our customers. You can book appointments, chat to schools or Frog experts and listen to some short customer presentations. Find out more here.

And there’s more! Friday has become Frog Friday. We have speaker sessions from both Alistair Smith and Mick Walker. Alistair will be presenting on Change Management and the seven steps of change, and Mick Walker is talking about Life After Levels, giving some much needed advice on how to deal with the removal of national attainment levels and putting assessment back at the heart of teaching and learning. Then Alistair rounds up Frog Friday with his talk on World Class Education. He defines what world class education is and how it can be achieved – he even sings a bit of Les Miserables. It’ll be an awesome day so if you’re at Bett make sure you stick around for Frog Friday.

And we’ve taken a bit of a gamble with the stand this year. I’m told it’s being made by the same people that did Lady Gaga’s stand and it’ll be very different to anything you’ve seen at Bett before; and we all get to find our next week whether it looks awesome, or just plain silly…